Apple craps are way overpriced

I'm not a huge Apple fan anymore (although I was in 1980s). I used Apple II+ and Apple IIe machines many years ago and thought they were "worth their weight in gold" at the time. They were tremendous values for what they were able to do, saving so much time istwas absolutely amazing (compared to using a calculator and typewriter to perform the same tasks). Time changes.

I started long before that, in the bad old days of mainfarame and mini computers, then PC's and had a wonderful experience with Amigas, when they came out with not only a full colour, dual GUI but and elegant and efficient unix kernel base OS that allowed pre-emptive multi-tasking and simultaneous command-line and graphic interface use...in 1985. It took both Apple and PC's more than another decade to match that, though of course you could always do something similar if you rolled your own on Unix machines like the Alpha micro of Sun Solaris-based systems.

Interestingly, this is a market in which Steve Jobs failed to really gain a foothold in, with his Next Unix-based system, but I suspect that that Unix experience had a lot to do with MacOSX, which had a lot to do with the revolutionary new product line that of which the MacBook Pro (and its Air spin-offs were/are the greatest successes.

But, Apple priced themselves out of the market, and I built an "IBM Compatible PC" machine myself to get a better price/performance ratio after I got tired to swapping floppies; buying a case, PSU, motherboard, 5MB (not GB) Seagate drive, 640KB of memory, Hercules Compatible Mono graphics card, clock/calendar card, etc. -- and I've stayed with Intel based machines since then.

I had a somewhat similar experience keeping a PowerMac "Sawtooth" we bought in 2000 going for a decade, because it was the basis of my musician wife's Pro Tools composition and music- editing system, and also became increasingly disgusted with Apple's manipulative ways of cutting off backward-compatibility, that eventually made it impossible to use her whole Pro-tools system.

But, the lower end MacBook Pro models are not bad at all, judging from what most reviewers think of them; and Apple has been more competitive in that niche lately.

I did buy a MBP, in large part because I noted that at the national meetings of Engineers Canada, which I was occasionally attended, most of the presenters - often heads of Engineering faculties - used MacBook Pros. These people certainly knew how to use computers and could likely have brought any laptop they wanted. They told me that they found it to be the best tool for the job. It worked well for me until I was dealing with close to 100K of digital RAW and jpg images and Colour Management of large prints on a large monitor. That particular model had a problem GPU (also used by other makers..but Apple was the last to admiit this and extend warranties) so I that was the start of moving my processing to a six-core PC system, which I'd always run as a paprellel image backup.

However, as stated earlier, my very talented wife does all her own full colour posters, websits, audio-editing andaudio and video clips and sample CD's on an older 21' iMac pro, and also digitized and edited over a hundred hours of Hi-8 family/travel videos on it withy absolutely no problem.

So, very likely, a medium-range MacBookPro would indeed be the best tool for the job described by the OP. Sounds like his wife - just like mine - is a very creative and productive person eager to continue and expand her capabilities. Mac excels at that.

If her productions reach a point where she will need the additional tools and capabilities that are more easily available on PC's, then she'll likely start moving to one.